Kid A: Special Collectors Edition

Capitol follows its excavation of Radiohead's 1990s work with new version of the band's first three 2000s LPs, including the landmark Kid A.

We used to listen to music in an entirely different way. There was once a time when music was organized into 45- to 75-minute chunks-- often a few standout tracks padded with a lot of mediocre filler, but occasionally designed so that the parts built up a larger structure. Used to be, people would sit down and listen to that lengthy piece of music from front to back in one sitting, resisting the urge to jump to their favorite parts or skip over the instrumental interlude that served as grout between two fuller compositions. These antiques were called CDs. Here's a story about the last of its kind.

When Kid A came out in October 2000, it sounded like the future. Unless you were a Napster whiz-kid, the record was one of the last to arrive unspoiled and complete, a physical object, the disquieting Stanley Donwood art reinforcing its dark mystery. It's arguably two-and-a-half minutes into "How to Disappear Completely"-- more than a third of the way through the album-- until anything sounds like a "RadioheadSong," even with how far the elastic of that term was stretched on OK Computer. And while Radiohead were far from the first to glitch-up their vocals with a computer or drown their compositions in ambient washes, it was still a thrilling experimental gamble for a band that could've profitably re-made "Karma Police" 100 times over with minimal reputational damage.

But simply flirting with new technology wasn't enough; even in 2000, the idea of a band "going electronic" was a laughable marketing gimmick from an era that spawned the term "electronica." But the samples, loops, and beats of Kid A were more than just the patronizing dalliance of a bored band, they were tools used to service the album's even deeper exploration of OK Computer's thesis on identity loss in computerized society. It was, unashamedly, a complete album, one where everything from production to arrangements to lyrics to album art were carefully crafted towards a unified purpose.

It's also a contoured album without clear highlights, best experienced in one sitting rather than cherrypicking the best parts. (It's telling that the band famously quarreled over the sequencing of tracks.) The biggest stylistic coup was the corruption of Thom Yorke's vocals-- arguably the band's most singular feature up to that point-- and the detuned-radio effects of the album's opening couplet: "Everything in Its Right Place" and "Kid A" threw listeners expecting that signature "Fake Plastic Trees" falsetto immediately into the deep end. On "The National Anthem", Yorke is shouted down by horn section mayhem, and when he finally gets in an unfiltered word in on "How to Disappear Completely", it's the album's most haunted (and revealing) line: "That there, that's not me."

There's no storyline to pick out from Yorke's lyrics, but a unified thread moves through the album nonetheless: Basically, Kid A is scary as hell. It might be the paranoid, nearly subliminal, unbroken undercurrent of haunted drone, courtesy of a Rhodes or a tape loop or Jonny Greenwood's Ondes-Martenot, a instrument for nightmares if there ever was one. Or it might be Yorke's terrifying one-line, Chicken Soup for the Agoraphobic Soul mantras that alternate between honeyed violence ("cut the kids in half") and clichés and hum-drum observations twisted into panic attacks ("where'd you park the car?").

(A brief intermission to talk about the bonus tracks included with this reissue. Capitol's in a tough spot with finding Kid A outtakes, because they already released such a thing-- it's called Amnesiac...*rimshot*. So instead the bonus-disc padding is all live tracks, culled from British and French radio or TV shows. In keeping with the album's isolation fixation, the empty studio of the four-track BBC session is the most fitting environment for the band's performance, the vocal manipulations of "Everything in Its Right Place" ricocheting off egg-crate walls. Contrast that with the clap-along crowd on an "Idioteque" from France, which neuters the song's sinister undercurrent and turns it into an inappropriate party jam.)

Every great album needs a great resolution, and Kid A has two: the angelic choir and harps of "Motion Picture Soundtrack" which serve as a much-needed (if fragile and a bit suspicious) uplift needed after such unrelenting bleakness, and a brief ambient coda that justifies the hidden-track gimmick. The silence that surrounds that final flash of hazy analog hiss is almost as rich, conferring a eerie feeling of weightlessness upon anyone who's completed the journey with a proper headphones listen.

But that's where the twist ending comes in. Kid A turned out not be the music of the future, but a relic of the past, more in line with dinosaurs like Dark Side of the Moon or Loveless as try-out-your-new-speakers, listen-with-the-lights-off suites. By the time Amnesiac officially arrived, it had been served up piecemeal on the internet, handicapping the final product from reproducing its predecessor's cohesive structure. From then on, albums have persisted, sure, but they're increasingly marginalized or stripped for parts-- release Kid A today, and many might choose to save or stream "Idioteque" and Recycle-Bin the rest, missing the contextual build and release that makes the album's demented-disco centerpiece all the more effective.

That's not a qualitative judgment: The way things are now isn't better or worse, just different. Technology, of course, is a selection pressure, digital music eroding the arbitrary 45ish-minute barrier that once was dictated by vinyl's finite diameter. But while a single song will often do, there's a talent to building and a pleasure in experiencing a dozen songs weaved together into a 40 minutes that's richer than each individual track, a 12-course meal for special occasions between microwave snacks. Like calligraphy, it's a fading art, as even Radiohead themselves seem to be disinterested in the format, perpetually threatening to dribble tracks out in ones or fours when the spirit takes them. In the end, one of the many ghosts that haunt the corridors of Kid A is The Album itself, it's death throes an unsettling funeral for a format that, like so much else, was out of time.